Multi-Cam on events with Video FX?

[John Rofrano]

[Dale McClelland] “Did I approach the workflow backwards, i.e. should multicam processing be done before adding FX?”

You have to to understand how Vegas multicam works in order to fully understand it’s limitations. What the process does is it combines multiple tracks into one. That means that you can’t use nay track FX because they will be lost. It also combines all the events on those multiple tracks into one event with multiple takes. That means you can use any event FX either because they will be lost. The only place left to put FX is on the media itself (and, of course, the master video bus).

What you should do is apply any color correction at the media level first. This way any place the media is used, it will be corrected. Then combine your tracks into multicam mode and make all of your camera decisions. Once you have the correct camera angles, apply any FX or stabilization. Personally, I don’t do stabilization in the project. I stabilize the footage and render it out and then use the rendered footage in my project.

[Dale McClelland] “But if I do multi-cam processing then FX, and later decide to change the multicam choices (i.e. which camera to use at a given point in the timeline), would I loose the FX again?”

You can change your camera decisions simply by using a different take or moving the split point, or both. No need to mess with the tracks again but if you do want to split out the tracks, all FX will be lost. 🙁

BTW, this is why multicam plug-ins like VASST Ultimate S Pro, VASST InfinitiCAM, and JetDV Exaclibur are still superior to the Vegas implementation. They preserve all of your event FX and event the track FX on the master track. You also never loose your original tracks because they build a new master track that you can rebuild any time you’d like. Using Vegas stabilization will also work with these plug-ins.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dale Mcclelland]

Thanks, John, for the thorough explanation. I will download the trial of InfinitiCam and try it.

For now, I tried to apply Mercalli v2 at the media level, but it doesn’t work. I right-clicked an event in the Project Media tab and selected Media FX, then chose Mercalli. When clicking on Mercalli’s “Start Analysis” button, it pops up a error message that says the video clip is not selected.

I get this message sometimes when using Mercalli as an event FX on a timeline event, but it is easily remedied by clicking on the video portion of the event and trying again. When applying Mercalli at the media level, there is no way to select only the video portion of the event because all that shows in the Media bin is a thumbnail. So unless I am missing something, the Media FX approach won’t work because of this Mercalli limitation.

So I ended up using your workflow — applying Mercalli as a timeline event FX, rendering to a file, then replacing the timeline event with the rendered file. That works of course, although it’s a bit time consuming when a lot of events are involved. And when doing the final project render, those events are rendered a second time, so I wonder about loosing quality.

Hopefully InfinitiCam will avoid the above limitations.

[Fabio Mereghetti]

I’m coming here from this thread:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/936896#936935

There I asked about multicam and crop/rotate and color correction. I read John explanation above about color correction (apply it to media level).

But what about corp/rotate?
I understand that I should apply the cropping after the multicam or do it before and then render to some intermediate: correct?

Another concern is due to the fact that I’m using a proxy for one of my three tracks and I can’t really figure out what workflow to follow.

In detail:
Track 1 – original media (3 clips) – muted
Track 2 – proxy of track 1 – color correction
Track 3 – original media – color correction + rotate + crop (match output aspect)
Track 4 – original media – color correction + crop (match output aspect)

As I’m only ccing (at media level) on the proxy track I should not have any problem in replacing the media just before the final render: right?

Which of the suites mentioned above should I look at for my needs?

Thanks.

fabio

[John Rofrano]

[fabio mereghetti] “I understand that I should apply the cropping after the multicam or do it before and then render to some intermediate: correct?”

Cropping works at the event level. Since multicam events contain cameras as takes, you cannot use cropping. As you pointed out, you’ll need to crop and render or crop in a nested project.

[fabio mereghetti] “As I’m only ccing (at media level) on the proxy track I should not have any problem in replacing the media just before the final render: right?”

That’s correct. You can simply replace the media and retain the color correcting.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com